BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Volume 2, Number 1 (Summer 2000)

Mary Jacobus, Psychoanalysis
and the Scene of Reading.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
241 pp. ISBN 0198184344.

Reviewed by Christina Zwarg
Haverford College

Almost inevitably, Derrida was asked if the method of deconstruction
was a psychoanalysis of philosophy. The essay “Freud and the Scene of
Writing” collected in the volume Writing and Difference provides
Derrida’s subtle response. There Derrida grants certain “discoveries”
to Freud even as he shows how psychoanalysis fails in the end to elaborate
the “repression” of writing throughout Western philosophy (197). For
such an elaboration, Derrida turns to Freud's troubled investment in
Nachtraglichkeit, the concept central both to his belated return
to trauma in Moses and Monotheism and to what Derrida calls the
“effect of deferral” (203) for his own elaboration of differance.

A resurgence of interest in trauma has occurred across the disciplines
over the past twenty-five years and Derrida is not alone in his recognition
that trauma occupies a troubled but productive lacuna in psychoanalytic
theory. Indeed, a reading of Derrida's work through the recent discussions
of trauma promises to be extremely useful. Mary Jacobus begins
to follow one or two of the implicit lines of such a reading by “riff[ing]”
(26) on Derrida’s title in her own, taking as her central focus the
“peculiar mental absorption involved in the activity called ‘reading’”
(2) and its relationship to certain psychoanalytic theories, including
the recent innovations of trauma studies. The “scene of writing,” so
vital to Derrida’s discussion of Freud’s speculative promise and
disappointment, now becomes the “scene of reading” for Jacobus, one
matching her own determination to deploy the “scene” of psychoanalysis
to refine the “accounts" (25) of reading at once so promising and undertheorized
in cultural studies today.

The careful attention Jacobus lavishes on the close of Derrida’s essay
reminds us that she continues to value the challenge Derrida poses for
our thinking, including our investment in the “spacing” and displacements
of reading. From the outset, Jacobus focuses on the “writerly” readers,
among them Rousseau, Claire de Duras, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Mary
Shelley, Mary Hays, Frantz Fanon, and Freud. Jacobus tells us that her
analysis should not be seen “as a contribution to recent attempts to
understand relations between gender, class, nation, and print culture
in the modern period, let alone as a brief history of reading or its
discontents” (8). Yet her essays all move steadily to the threshold
of these concerns. Indeed, it is precisely the threshold of reading
that is at stake here: borrowed from D.W. Winnicott, the “potential
space” of both play and cultural experience supplies reading’s most
enigmatic and valuable site for Jacobus. Preferring not to empty
this enigmatic boundary of its historical value, Jacobus explores scenes
of reading in “historically specific private and public spaces” (33)
notably those of “modernity” worried by Alix Strachey and Viriginia
Woolf. So too, Jacobus refines the “engendered and disembodied”
ideal of “Enlightenment rationality” (206) that emerges in the “Habermasian”
notion of the public sphere by paying close attention to certain women
writers of the period, notably Mary Hays. Here Jacobus joins Nancy Fraser
in her effort to include a closer look at the transformation of the
private sphere grounding the idea of community elaborated by Habermas.
It seems inevitable that a long-standing interest in feminism would
foster this shift from “scenes of writing” to “scenes of reading,” though
Jacobus does not so insist, perhaps because the women uniquely situated
at those scenes already demonstrate this status. While women reading
outnumbered women publishing, these readers influenced what Habermas
calls important social “experiments” with “subjectivity” through their
role in epistolary exchanges. Authors like Hays make this clear,
according to Jacobus.

The six chapters in this volume were originally the 1997 Clarendon
Lectures in English Literature at Oxford University. Revised during
her year as a Faculty Fellow at the Society for Humanities at Cornell,
the essays reflect a rich reading itinerary in themselves. That abundance
is reflected in both the choice of topics and the valuable array of
notes accompanying each (here nicely situated at the foot of the page).
Jacobus divides her book into three parts. Part One, “Scenes of Reading,”
contains two essays introducing the psychoanalytic concepts threading
the volume and highlighting her particular emphasis on the “temporary
form of madness permitted by both reading and psychoanalysis” (13) as
a state through which real “change” may be possible for the “work of
culture” (24). Jacobus deploys British object-relations theory,
notably that emerging from theories of Melanie Klein and post-Kleinian
analysts, including those working on the Continent in fruitful conversation
with this revision of Freud. At the same time, Jacobus does not wish
to “chart local vicissitudes of psychoanalysis” (8). Thus we as
readily discover a passage from Winnicott as we discover one from Klein,
Hanna Segal, Riviere, Ferenczi, Laplanche or Nicolas Abraham (to name
a few) as Jacobus works with brio through various literary texts.

The opening chapters take us back to the moment when reading was first
being theorized actively by analysts like Strachey to include questions
of “incorporation, introjection, and projection” explored as “moveable
boundaries” of “aesthethic rapport” (45) by writers like Virginia Woolf.
Part Three, “Romantic Women, ” marks a valuable elaboration of the work
begun through the delightful reading of Strachey and Woolf and
an accompanying chapter on Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise and
Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. As a student of the Romantic period
and its deferral “effect” on women, Jacobus discovers cognate concerns
in Mary Shelley’s Matilda and Memoirs of Emma Courtney by
Mary Hays. It would be impossible to do justice to the subtlety of the
arguments made through the extensive and close readings provided by
Jacobus, though it is perhaps useful to note that each one works to
gloss assumptions about reading presented within them. Throughout, special
attention is paid to “concepts or unconscious phantasies of inner and
outer, absence and boundaries, and the transmission of thoughts and
feelings between one self (or historical period) and another” (9).

Jacobus is most determined to show how Freud’s notion of “object
loss” in Mourning and Melancholia (albeit transformed by Klein
and her heirs) can help us to “think our own relation to lost objects
when we read” (25). This ambition, inviting a unique look at the relationships
shaping each woman writer, depends upon a subtle interpretation of what
Jacobus calls the “double time” of rereading. Playing somewhat freely
with Derrida’s critique of “presence,” [writing that “the negative of
presence is not absence, but hatred” (57)] Jacobus invests the
concept of “absence” with a temporal dimension; through this haunting
double valence she begins to show how the psychoanalytic understanding
of absence has a cultural dimension. Her interpretation of Mary Shelley’s
“unreadability effect” (making good use of an earlier essay by Tilottama
Rajan) is one of her most compelling, in my view. There Jacobus helps
us to imagine how Shelley may have been cut off from a recognition of
her own best work in the writing of that book, leading her reader to
experience the same.

Yet the focus on absence and particularly the effect of “mourning”
so prevalent throughout all of these chapters leads to the most provocative
caesura in this volume. Part Two, the center section entitled “Reading
Trauma,” enacts a type of traumatic disruption of the argument connecting
the first and third sections of the book. In the two chapters at the
middle, Jacobus moves her attention into the widely popular realm of
trauma theory. Her earlier focus on the double meaning of “absence”
with its temporal dimension began that association (it is not far from
Freud’s interest in the double valence of “distortion” in Moses and
Monotheism), particularly as it plays into her discussion of the
“double time” of rereading. Yet Jacobus is not particularly concerned
with the changes in her theoretical ground that a direct emphasis on
trauma might demand.

Jacobus chooses to open the first essay with a brief allusion to Frantz
Fanon’s engagement with the potential and limit of psychoanalysis for
both an analysis of racial trauma and an enactment of revolutionary
transformation. It was Fanon, of course, who first deployed protocols
of reading from psychoanalysis for his understanding of the postcolonial
subject. His forceful rejection of the Oedipus complex for black Antillean
culture did not deter him from embracing valuable (and sometimes problematic)
Lacanian revisions of Freud for his social commentary. Indeed, one could
argue that Fanon’s tentative revision of Freudian trauma theory proves
central to his revolutionary critique. Rather than giving us a full
analysis of Fanon, however, Jacobus provides a close reading of two
novels separated in time, Ourika by Claire de Duras and A
Woman Named Solitude by Andre Schwarz-Bart. Jacobus is interested
here in finding a “transracial imaginary” that can enable a “radical
displacement” in our reading, allowing us not only to “read with different
eyes,” but also to “read one historical trauma in and through another).
This idea of the “transracial imaginary,” while provocative, remains
only implicit in these readings, however. One wonders, in fact, if this
concept should remain the goal of the book’s deliberate engagement with
the “Location of Cultural Experience” in our reading. Here Derrida’s
concern for the nostalgia of Western culture might be revisited. [After
all, when summoning Melanie Klein in the closing paragraphs of “Freud
and the Scene of Writing,” Derrida cautioned that a “prudent” (231)
reading of her work would be imperative.]

In her analysis of the trials of the black colonial subject in these
novels, Jacobus repeatedly refers to their entanglement in the specular
economy of colonial encounter and subjugation. The constant “need” by
“Western civilization” to “represent itself, to itself” (103) is the
source of this economy, according to Jacobus. Yet the mechanisms
of this economy are the same ones which invariably ground the theories
of “absence” and mourning which Jacobus also deploys for her earlier
readings of Austen and Rousseau. The Kleinian account of literary creation
upon which so much of the analysis depends is one that “tends
to emphasize the impulse to recover past times and lost objects, or
to repair damaged ones” (83). While Jacobus does say, in passing, that
what she calls “literary memory” does not only work in this way,
she somewhat casually ignores the unhappy “equivalences” (32) between
this process and the “creative” work of the conquest and domination.
For this reader, “seeing with different eyes” will require a stronger
transvaluation of her earlier powerful insight into the temporality
of absence.

Jacobus is forced to ask in the end if the unconscious can “resist
the specular legacy of colonial oppression?” (110). While her answer,
in the service of subaltern agency, is obviously yes, it nevertheless
depends too readily upon a fondness for the borderline conditions of
the “madness” in reading and psychoanalysis. True, it is on that site
that Jacobus provides one of her more compelling readings of literature
as the “borderline where one state of mind crosses over to another (and
indeed one’s state of mind may be transferred to another)” (133). Her
valuable tour of important literary encounters with trauma theory (notably
Geoffrey Hartman, Cathy Caruth, Mark Seltzer, Elaine Scarry, Diana Fuss,
Andre Green and Jean Laplanche) proves fascinating and productive for
the attentive reader. It is certainly complicated by the “effect of
deferral” on her analysis of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memoirs
of a Wartime Childhood. The belated disclosure of the author’s identity
and the scandal surrounding his “recovered memory” provides a “timely
reminder,” according to Jacobus, “that trauma theory is more than just
another branch of aesthetics” (162). Yet the reader of this essay cannot
help but wish for a still greater elaboration of the reference to W.R.
Bion whose advice to “investigate the caesura; not the analyst” (123)
assumes an ironic cast by the end of the essay. Perhaps Barthes put
it best when he cautioned: “Those who do not reread are obliged to read
the same text everywhere.” The final thoughts on Bion that we do get,
including a nice play by Jacobus on his distinction between “tears”
and “moisture,” merely tease without demonstrating the full prescience
of Bion’s thought.

One applauds the creative associations Jacobus discovers throughout
her argument, particularly when they reflect so vividly on the traumatic
structures informing this activity we call reading. If it is really
true that “reading is what we do when we make [a] commitment to otherness”
(13), it remains for those “attentively” absorbing the extraordinary
intellectual energy of this volume to elaborate the full peril and hope
of that commitment.